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Agri-environmental policies have become increasingly prominent measures in the farm sector of England and Wales. This major development has not escaped the attention of agricultural geographers, but little work has emerged which overtly explores the geographical consequences of agri-environmental policy on land use patterns and countryside conservation. Understanding this geography is important...
This article presents a discussion of one of the first large-scale community based rural land claims in South Africa. The Makuleke land claim was highly contentious, as it involved more than 20 stakeholders: government departments, local communities and their chiefs, NGOs, mining companies, commissions and task teams, and individuals; all pursuing vested and conflicting interests. [According to the...
This article is about the politics of conservation in postcolonial Southern Africa. It focuses on the process and consequences of redefining the Nile crocodile as an endangered species and explores the linked local and international, commercial and conservationist interests that allowed the animal to re-establish itself in state-protected waterways in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It investigates...
Between 1970 and 1980 villages adjacent to the Dong Mun Uplands of Northeastern Thailand were transformed from subsistence communities, based on wet rice production, to a cash economy linked to global markets and the national and international political order. Although formally designated reserves had been created on old growth forests, the new economic opportunities encouraged conversion of forests...
The United States is often considered the progenitor of conservation planning in the world, the first to establish a vast public domain, for example. But with continued population growth, conservation planning on private lands—rural and at the urban fringe—continues to be a substantial challenge due to a tradition of local home rule in land use planning and strong private property protection afforded...
South Africa is unique in that its globally significant biodiversity, which is under significant threat, coexists with an apartheid history of dispossession that produced a starkly unequal land ownership pattern and widespread rural poverty. It is in this context that the post-apartheid government must fulfil constitutional and international obligations to safeguard environmental assets as well as...
The idealization of natural landscapes and peoples during colonialism, coupled with the popularity of sustainable development in the postcolonial era, has contributed to the expansion of conservation planning throughout the African continent. Concerns surrounding the promotion of national and international conservation agendas at the expense of local livelihood needs have generated interest in community...
The livelihood strategies of former rubber tappers in the Amazon region are rapidly shifting from extraction of non-timber forest products to mixed systems based on agriculture and small scale cattle ranching. Using a combination of participatory methods and Geographical Information Systems, a case study in western Acre, Brazil explores how rubber tapper livelihood strategies may be changing, and...
This paper explores the operation of the international World Heritage Convention in the national context of the United States. Although an early advocate of the national park idea and among the earliest proponents of the Convention, the US has shown increasing ambivalence towards the World Heritage Program since the mid-1990s. Through in-depth interviews with expert informants and a questionnaire...
One of Piers Blaikie’s most important contributions to the development of political ecology is his critique of land and resource conservation policy in the global South. In this paper I trace the development of Blaikie’s ideas about the policy relevance of political ecology, focusing particularly on the challenges posed by the introduction of poststructural social theory into the field. I begin by...
Human–wildlife conflict (HWC) is a growing problem for communities located at the borders of protected areas. Such conflicts commonly take place as crop-raiding events and as attack by wild animals, among other forms. This paper uses a feminist political ecology approach to examine these two problems in an agricultural village located at the border of Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand (formerly...
Conservation efforts often neglect the importance of monitoring of protected areas, which is key to adaptively managing dynamic landscapes. In many developing countries, like Trinidad, protected areas are set aside as a result of an agreement with an international conservation organization, often resulting in inadequate planning and monitoring of the protected area. Monitoring of protected areas allows...
The demise of the Soviet Union precipitated profound changes in formerly collectivised rural spaces across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. However, it is only recently that attention to the post-Soviet ‘land question’ has begun to move beyond predominant, practical concerns with land restitution and fragmentation and towards engagement with diverse discourses of rurality, nature and modernity. In...
Environmental politics, argues French philosopher Bruno Latour, have been a ‘disappointment’. Rather than trying to bring environmental concerns into a political world split into two – between Nature/Science and politics/society – Latour argues that environmental movements ought to focus on destroying this two-house collective, and develop ‘an understanding of ecological crises that no longer uses...
The world over, neoliberal modes of conservation are hybridising with, or even replacing, other forms of conservation. Under the banner of ‘win–win’ policies, planners actively work to commoditize natural resources and the social relations that determine the use and conservation of these resources. While these general processes seem to hold sway globally, it is crucial not to lose sight of the context...
Costa Rica’s national payment for environmental services (PES) program has inspired a large body of research, most of which seeks to assess its impacts on deforestation and/or poverty. The specific forms of governance shaping the program, by contrast, have received much less attention. While the program, like PES in general, is commonly considered a paradigmatically neoliberal “market-based” conservation...
Recently in Vietnam, a coalition of international NGOs, donors and government officials have been promoting market-based forest conservation projects in the form of payments for environmental services (PES) as a win–win for both conservation and development objectives; Vietnam is now the first country in Southeast Asia with a national law on PES. This article provides a macro survey of how market-based...
In the context of rural land conservation, neoliberalisation involves an increasingly wide range of changes in formal and informal institutional arrangements. These affect the relationship between the state and the market in a variety of ways and have different implications for the governance of rural land. In the context of rural land conservation in the UK, we identify a broad range of changes to...
This paper critically engages with the role of conservation practitioners as ‘expert intermediaries’ in the development of payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes in the UK. Centring on the case study of the Wildlife Trust’s Pumlumon Project in Mid Wales, the paper connects the advance of neoliberal governance strategies to the experiences and attitudes of conservationists, charting a more personalised...
Contemporary European agriculture has a number of additional aims beside of food production, such as safeguarding environmental services and conservation values. Substantial efforts at official levels are aimed towards sustainable development but also towards maintaining values of what may be termed vanishing landscapes. Selected areas and landscape features are set aside for protection or restoration...
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